A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Atomic Magazine and GIGABYTE put on a show for its lucky readers at AtomicHQ in Sydney overnight.

The LN2 flowed free and fast last night, at our first sub-zero overclocking event here at Atomic HQ!

We opened the doors as the rest of Haymarket's staff were leaving, after casting a rather curious eye over the mess of gaming systems being set up by Team Immunity, and at the arcane tools of the serious overclocker. As folks showed up, both youngpro and dinos22, from TeamAU, got down to the action.

After a brief safety intro from Dino (essential when dealing with stuff as chillingly cold as LN2), our guests split into teams and got to work on two GIGABYTE boards, a UD3 and a UD5, each with a new Ivy Bridge processor, while some of the staff (ahem) got to testing out the Battlefield 3 LAN.

It's tough work!

Couple of readers warming up for an insane Battlefield3 frag off!

Dinos22 giving a quick rundown on GIGABYTE digital PWM and monster overclocking boards the lucky group was about to OC on their own (and hit some tremendous frequencies!)

Visit Atomic site for the event photo gallery and more on how the two competitions went with Battlefield3 playoff and LN2 OC dinos22 vs youngpro’s teams!

TeamAU boys, dinos22 and youngpro, had some extra LN2 to burn off and benchmarked 3DMARK01 with a new killer 3D01 bios and showed off nice efficiency the boards have now. Any 3DMARK01 tragic out there will absolutely love the new bios (to be released next week in beta!). Benchmarks were done on GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H and Z77X-UD3H, both solid extreme OC boards!

GTL is meant as a quick and easy way to type in OC settings when inside a Windows environment. It’s not as flashy as EasyTune 6 with all it’s sliders, buttons, fan speed control, etc…, but that’s just the point: it’s for tweakers who know what settings they want to arrive at. This would be a great tool for overclocking teams who’s members are based in different locations and may be IMing settings to each other as they test common components.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Good morning to you all. I want to give you heads up about an insanely detailed and well thought out overclocking guide for Ivy Bridge and Z77 platform that sin0822 put together and posted about on forums yesterday.

The guide is fit for beginners and LN2 overclockers and has some detailed information about various aspects of this new platform from voltage scaling, LN2 or water OC, voltage guidelines, digital power option setup & tweaking, RAM overclocking tips, LLC analysis, bios profiles, insulating boards for subzero, you name it….

I’ll leave a couple of screenshots but for the full story check out this link. He ends the article with a quick taste of a little GIGABYTE SniperM3 doing some multithreaded benchmarking past 6GHz. Even the little boards with 4-pin input can handle some serious grunt in case some were wondering.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Just a few days ago, tonymacx86, (not surprisingly the chief writer for tonymacx86.com – arguably the best Hackintosh site on the web) announced to the world that GIGABYTE UEFI BIOS on our Z77 boards was offering better OSX support than previously possible, making Hackintosh building easier than ever:

“Big news! The Gigabyte UEFI on the Z77 chipset works natively with OS X power management- you don't need a DSDT to wake/sleep, and no kernel panics on power management whatsoever!!” The reason for this lies with our unique UEFI BIOS coding, which allows for an OSX install without needing a DSDT file. As LG Nilsson at VR-Zone explains:

“Normally when you build a Hackingtosh you need something called a DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) as this is how OS X can detect what kind of hardware you have in your system. Without a DSDT Hackintoshes tend to go into kernel panic mode, i.e. they're pretty much useless.…

However, the latest motherboards from Gigabyte don't appear to need a DSDT file for basic functionality, as the boards boot into OS X just fine without it….It's not entirely clear what Gigabyte has done to make this work, but it's made the life of those wanting to install an alternative OS on their PC a lot easier.”

I’m not going to divulge here exactly what we’ve done to achieve this improved support, but suffice it to say that we’re happy to make life easier for a small but dedicated band of DIYers who dare to bridge the x86 – Apple divide.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

This must be one of the toughest couple of months as an overclocker and enthusiast to have had to go through I swear! We all had to respect the NDA until early hours this morning when it finally lifted. What an amazing new platform (for lack of a better word)! Intel has finally given overclockers the jackpot! The new king is in town and geeks call it IVY BRIDGE.

Today marks the day when just about any overclocking world record you can imagine will get smashed due to Intel’s ability to finally figure out and remove cold bug from the processors and cold scaling. We are talking 3D benching up to 7GHz on the most efficient platform in history.

I’d like to congratulate a friend, youngpro, for clinching some really nice records himself today, single card 3DMARK03 and 3DMARK05 global records using GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3Hand7970OC GPU as well as 32M and 1024M Wprime multithreaded scores. Congrats James! Keep pushing!

GIGABYTE R&D team including bios guys, top management, software guys, just about everyone has started working very hard on this platform a year ago. We have a new digital PWM on the boards now. It ROCKS! Boards are very stable, bench at monster frequencies, behave great subzero, run very efficient and have some great overclocking features even on the affordable range of boards! Great effort to the whole GIGABYTE team!

Monday, April 16, 2012

PC PowerPlay magazine reviewed the new GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H WiFi board and says GIGABYTE’s thrown everything in the package but the kitchen sink, calling it their new Z77 motherboard of choice! You can’t go wrong with the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H-WB.

Gigabyte really has thought of everything with this motherboard ­ it has even included its own software package that makes installing Intel’s Smart Response, Rapid Start and Smart Connect suite a breeze. The price might seem a little high at first glance, but when you realise how much you’ll save on a WiFi card, Bluetooth dongle and soundcard, it’s actually damn good value! This is our new Z77 motherboard of choice.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Every year intel hosts a large (300+ gamers) weekend long LAN gaming event at the Intel office in Folsom California. This year I'm fortunate to be able to show our latest Z77 and X79 motherboards including the new Sniper 3 and Sniper M3 G1-Killer gaming motherboards. Special thanks to all the guys at Intel and Lee Harrington for the awesome case mods.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Following up on his physical inspection of our brand new Z77X-UD5H, power user and all round motherboard expert Sin0822 has now published his full and complete performance review, covering pretty much every performance-related aspect possible.

Here’s a sample of what Sin has to say:

“If you are looking for a Z77 board without headaches and great performance and overclocking, take a look no further than the Z77X-UD5H. At $200 without Wifi & BT, and $230 with the Wifi& BT the price and performance of this proper Z77 board are hard to beat. GIGABYTE could have easily charged more, but this time I guess they are being really nice.”

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Awardfabrik put up what they call a tech demo with some new Intel CPUs. Awardfabrik is a well known German enthusiast forum. Anyone here remember endless time and coins we wasted playing this game on the old school arcade machines?

Hah hah hah, good one boys!

You guys notice the 12 unreleased Intel CPUs in the midst of action, EEEEEK? Didn’t realise they are on sale yet, LOL!

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Thermaltake have just published some fantastic photos of their latest and greatest Level 10 GT Battle Edition Chassis on the Facebook page and we’re chuffed to bits to see them choose our knockout G1. Assassin 2 as the demo motherboard. I mean, it makes perfect sense. If you’re going to build a rig using this chassis you’re going to fit it out with the ultimate gaming hardware…which is just what the X79-based G1. Assassin 2 is all about.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Australia is probably better known for its sun drenched beaches and surfing but the gaming scene is certainly alive and well. Team Immunity, proudly sponsored by GIGABYTE, is one of those pro teams from down under that carries the Australian flag in international gaming tournaments.

Australian gamers showed the world they are the force to be reckoned with by taking out the prestigious Clanbase Nations’ Cup XV tournament in Battlefield 3 by defeating (destroying really!!!) a very strong Team Finland in the final who were undefeated up until that point.

deathdoG from Team Immunity put some pretty crazy highlights from the match on youtube. This guy is a machine I’m telling you!

Congrats to all the Team Immunity guys that took part in the final lineup

Matthew 'Redding' Redding (C)

Steven 'SadAct' Valle (C)

Ben 'oxide' Tory

Josh 'deathdoG' Edwards

Glenn 'Amril' Starcevich

Chris 'Yellow' McGillivray

Comzat

TetraChloride

Cybergamer forum has a report on the tournament if you want to read some more including the full Team Australia lineup and some interesting info about how much of an underdog the team was that they were predicted to finish second last in the group stages by a DICE community manager. Someone is eating his own foot right now I think!

Monday, April 9, 2012

VRZone went to the GIGABYTE Nan-Ping factory in Taiwan to inspect the Z77 boards being built and tested. GIGABYTE is the only motherboard manufacturer to still operate half of its factories in Taiwan, particularly for mid to high end products. Quality matters to GIGABYTE with 100% of the boards produced being hand tested as shown in the video, check it out!

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Colin introduces the latest 7 series motherboards that support the forthcoming 3rd generation Intel® Core™ processors and boast a range of new features including GIGABYTE 3D BIOS, All Digital Power and the latest Ultra Durable 4 technology. He highlights some of the features that make these mobos worth the upgrade from previous generation 6 series and older mobos.

Overclockers Australia, also known as OCAU worldwide, has taken GIGABYTE onboard as the major sponsor today. This is a pretty exciting day as OCAU is one of those iconic forums worldwide that brought up some really well known overclocking names.

I personally started getting involved in the community around 2006 but before my time there was a few iconic names that popped up and proudly wore Australian colours. One of those guys which is probably remembered by Aussie and world overclockers was CodeRed who was the author and man responsible for A64Tweaker application which was the THE one and only app giving extreme overclockers/tweakers the opportunity to tweak their AMD system and improve performance and break those world records during AMD years.

Eva2000 was and still is an iconic RAM tweaker. Eva2000 helped form TeamAU.net and i4memory.com to further increase awareness of this crazy hobby and attracted and inspired a lot of overclockers since, dinos22 (me), T_M, Kayl, SLI_dog, moloko, youngpro, deanzo, sniperOz, Uncle Fester, bob(nz) who are all regular contributors at OCAU just to name a few…

If you haven’t been to OCAU before, check it out here and here. It now sports some fantastic sub-communities including a really great photography forum, motoring and a couple of others which are just unlike any other in my experience.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

I had a play with the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H WiFi board to check what WiFi performance is like versus gigabit LAN in terms of internet download speeds.

It was tested on Telstra’s 100Mbps down/2Mbps up cable internet connection hitting 116Mbps in speed tests and averaging around 13.5-14MB/s download from a local demo games server. Performance seemed identical to Intel gigabit LAN adapter in this brief test. Pretty cool!

Gabriel Torres from Hardware Secrets did a preview of the new GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3H today and found it was “a top mainstream motherboard, meaning it is targeted to the average user who wants something extra.” Click on the image to read the full preview (it’s pretty detailed I like it :))

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

When we read about some of the problems with charging the new iPad from USB and even some wall chargers, we thought we’d test out our 3X USB Power feature. Needless to say, the results are encouraging to say the least. Below is a picture of a new iPad (3rd gen) taking 2.02A from the USB 3.0 port of one of GIGABYTE’s new Z77 mobos.

Here’s a quick video that Colin put together to show how the testing was done. Keep in mind that the more an iPad charges, the lower the amperage that it takes (this is standard for most consumer electronics products), so the amperage that you see will vary as the battery charges.

Now you may want to remind us that the new iPad does not have a USB 3.0 port. This is not an issue because USB 3.0 ports are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 devices, so USB 3.0 ports on GIGABYTE mobos can be used to sync and charge iPads. The main difference being that the USB 3.0 power spec is 0.9A, where USB 2.0 is 0.5A. GIGABYTE's 3x Power﻿ feature enables 2.7A from USB 3.0 ports and more than 1.5A from USB 2.0 ports.

At this point I’d like to distinguish between GIGABYTE On/Off Charge and 3x USB Power. These are two different features on most GIGABYTE motherboards.

a. On/Off Charge comes from an onboard USB header with a red background, and allows Apple devices to charge even when the PC is off (as long as the PSU is still connected to the wall socket and has power).

b. 3x USB Power is available from all or most ports, depending on the model, and essentially consists of a PCB with reinforced tracing from the power connector to each of the USB ports. Additionally, each USB port has it’s own fuse and these fuses have a higher limit (over 1.5A for USB 2.0 ports and 2.7A for USB 3.0 ports) for the maximum current that they will put out. This does not mean that they always put out the max current, because the current draw is determined by the device, not the motherboard, so there is not chance that your device will be force fed too high a current. The initial logic behind 3X USB Power was that we can’t control the quality of USB cables that people would use with our motherboards, so there would always be varying amounts of power degradation. With 3x USB Power your USB device should always be able to get enough current to keep it running stably and reliably.

I hope this clears up any questions. Feel free to post comments or questions about these technologies in the comments section below.